"ios 7" entries

Upward Mobility: The Hidden Cost of iOS7

It's much easier to change an iPhone's case design than to retool an entire ecosystem of apps

As with every Apple iOS release, iOS7 started to become a serious item for developers at the WWDC held the summer before the release, when all the ins and outs of the new capabilities start to be made available to the development community under NDA. In most cases, the technologies that are announced fall into two broad categories: new toys and better ways to do existing things.

New toys are always seen as a positive, because they don’t tend to require anyone to change anything in existing code unless they want to, or need to take advantage of the new capabilities. Examples of this have included Storyboards and Autolayout. If you wanted to use ’em, you could. If you liked things the way they are, no problem either.

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Making the Leap to iOS 7

What to look out for when updating your code

As a bewildered Dorothy says in the movie The Wizard of Oz, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” When you open your iOS 6 project in Xcode 5 and run it in the iOS 7 simulator, you’ll know instantly that things have changed:

notInKansas

 

 

[contextly_sidebar id=”e027d3655ea50711dd31b81666c293d7″]Gone is the colored status bar background; the status bar is always transparent, and all apps are full-screen apps, underlapping the status bar. A button has no rounded rect bezel, unless you draw it yourself as the button’s background. Many interface objects are drawn differently, with different dimensions. The subtle bar gradient is gone; colors are flat, unless you draw a gradient background yourself.

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What Does iOS 7 Mean for Developers?

UI dynamics, multitasking, maps, and more

iOS 7 is here and we are all very excited. But, as programmers, this isn’t a time to celebrate. This is a time to be concerned. About what, you ask? API Differences is all I can say. How does iOS 7 affect our apps and what is there for us to learn? The iOS SDK is a huge collection of APIs and many of us won’t have time to play with all of the APIs. So we need to be selective about what APIs we use and how efficiently we plan to use them. In this post, I’m going to briefly tell you about some of the new APIs that you need to keep an eye on in iOS 7.

Additions to iOS 7

UI Dynamics
These are all the Dynamics APIs that Apple has added to UIKit. Start by learning about the UIDynamicAnimator class and take it from there. That is the key to UI Dynamics.

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Upward Mobility: If I Were King of XCode

Even a great development environment has room for improvement

As the not-so-mysterious September 10th Apple event approaches, it’s widely anticipated that the final version of iOS 7 will be released at the same time. Along with it will come a new version of XCode. While XCode is a pretty awesome development environment (in my opinion, at least), there are a few things that just irk the heck out of me. So, if anyone at Apple happens to be listening, here’s my laundry list of things I’d like to see fixed.

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